Ten Days in Tahrir

Matt Pearce: Ten Days in Tahrir

On November 18, as it careened toward democracy, Egypt got a partial glimpse of its future on the midsized patch of concrete and dirt in downtown Cairo known as Tahrir Square.

It was a hazy and warm Friday, the day of prayer and the typical day of protest. Activists across the political spectrum had called for a unity rally ten days before the country’s first round of parliamentary elections since the winter revolution. But if there was any unity, it was mostly among the Islamists, who had come out for one of their largest demonstrations on the square since July 29. “Today the beards started to move,” Aida El-Kashef, a film director, tweeted sardonically to her followers.

The “beards” arrived on buses and sometimes in placard-bearing columns marching into the square, chanting against military rule. Vendors hawked flags and t-shirts memorializing the January 25 revolution to the overwhelmingly male demonstrators. While chatting with a young man standing next to me who said he supported an Islamist government, I asked him where the women were. “All the women are back there,” he said, pointing toward the center of the square and toward what appeared to be a large crowd of men. “If you look around, you will see them.” I looked around and realized that, in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd participating in one of Egypt’s highest-profile political rallies, I couldn’t see a single woman at all.

This was Tahrir Square at its most Egyptian: the country’s iconic but deceptive point of protest, a blank canvas onto which Egyptians could paint almost any image from their vast palette of grievances. For ten days in November, it became an amorphous portrait of a fragmented country coming to terms with itself, and the first day began with a muscular Islamist sitting. They were poised to form the backbone of any popularly elected government in Egypt, and they came to protest the military junta that had closed its fingers around the democratic process—and thus their imminent rule.

IBRAHIM EL HADDAD, a young Salafist wearing aviators who already had developed the purple prayer bruise on his forehead that marks a true believer, worried that any Islamist victory would be unfairly discredited by Americans. He told me he wanted the Egyptian government to be moderate Islamic, not hardline, and he craved better understanding from the West.

“As in any other country in the world, anyone can be a part of a democratic government,” El Haddad said. Indeed, attending the rally was almost everyone about whom Egyptian secularists were nervous: the popular and well-organized Muslim Brotherhood, whose party line carefully stuck to themes of democracy and civil rights but whose platform lacked specifics, and also the energetic Salafists—an ultraconservative political force threatening to yank the conversation rightward—whose members sometimes wear fashionable, pre-stressed jeans while calling for their country to turn back more than a thousand years, to the time of the Prophet. Adherents wear long beards with shaved mustaches. The extent of their presence in Egyptian political life had only become apparent after the revolution cashiered Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

“As a Salafist, I am not an alien,” El Haddad continued. “I am not different from other humans. I just have a different political and religious approach. I respect everyone: I respect atheists, and I don’t judge them or accuse them of being different or harmful. So why can’t people respect that Salafists refer to Al-Azhar, one of the most important Islamic references in the world?” El Haddad thought the Salafists would win parliament in the upcoming election—and if not, they’d win it eventually or gain control “a different way,” he added cryptically.

At that moment, another Salafist in a chic wool trenchcoat cut in and told my interpreter, a friend from Lebanon, not to translate what El Haddad said. The man, Mohamed Mustafa Koptan, a doctor in Cairo, confidently stepped into the conversation and detailed his own vision of Salafist governance, voicing concepts that had only recently become widely discussed across Egypt. “There is a big difference between the Salafist community in the mosque and the Salafist community in society and day-to-day life,” Koptan said. “There is also a huge difference between the application of Islamic laws in the mosque and the application of Islamic laws in the state or within a governmental context. If the Salafists hold power in Egypt, they will have to start by cleaning up the mess caused by the former regime. It will take years to deal with the corruption, illegal transactions, under-table deals, and theft.”

Like the other Middle Eastern uprisings agglomerated into what we now call the Arab Spring, Egypt’s uprising had largely not been about installing a religious regime but about reclaiming basic human dignity: better living conditions, less brutal policing, and the eviction of mendacious rulers. While the average Egyptian family lives on roughly $2,000 a year, Mubarak’s son—to cite just one example of the regime’s questionable inner workings—was profiting off the buying and selling of Egypt’s debt on favorable terms, according to Steven A. Cook’s The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square. The social contract Egyptians had lived under for the previous six decades—heavy-handed but steady rule in exchange for economic security—had broken down and left the country ripe for its transfixing, activist-inspired revolution in January.

Mubarak suppressed all opposition during his reign, so the movement to overthrow him cut across ideological divisions. But the strength the Salafists’ theocratic vision surprised many outside observers. “In the land of Islam, I can’t let people decide what is permissible or what is prohibited,” a Salafi party spokesman told the Associated Press in December. “It is God who gives the answers as to what is right and what is wrong.” A Salafi parliamentary candidate recently called Egyptian Nobel prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz’s popular novels “all prostitution.”

“People shouldn’t worry about the establishment of Islamic laws, as this will come in a later stage,” Koptan told me in Tahrir, as a pro-Islamist crowd encircled us to listen and the Muslim Brotherhood’s speakers led booming chants on the other side of the square. “Islam taught us methodology. When God banned alcohol, he introduced this concept over four stages. God taught us to be methodical when presenting new concepts, and that is how things will go.”

“I HOPE that something bad happens,” Sharif, the guy who worked at the desk of my hotel, said to me before the Friday rally. After all, he said, unless something bad happened, nothing would change. He was twenty-three and stylish, a bit of a ladies’ man, but he made less than $100 a month, and it took him an hour and a half to get home from work. He still had a plastic pellet lodged beneath the skin of his forehead from when he’d been shot during the winter uprising. He liked to pull up his shirt to show the stab wound he’d taken.

Sharif got his wish. Late on Friday a few activists, rumored to be secularists, pitched tents to continue the demonstration, and the military, exhibiting its characteristic heavy-handedness, cleared out the occupiers, inspiring a hail of stones in return. After Sharif got off work on Saturday night, we walked down to Tahrir Square to see what was happening. State security forces were unloading tear gas and rubber bullets into Tahrir Square, and kids banged rocks against the metal railways along the square in almost tribal cadences to warn of the danger. Sharif immediately charged to the front, disappearing with stone in hand. He reappeared fifteen minutes later, bleary-eyed and staggering from the tear gas, and bleeding from the knuckles. He liked fighting. He would stay on the square, fighting, for the next nine hours.

Tahrir had shifted again. No more Islamists. No one quite knows where they came from, but there they were: the youth. This group, also male, now massed on the edges of Tahrir Square bearing Molotov cocktails and stones they’d made by breaking up sidewalks, turning their square into a weapon as well as a home. They didn’t have signs, and they weren’t there to make peace; they were there to fight and to survive. They donned construction helmets, welding helmets, bicycle helmets, boxing helmets, flags as capes, flags as flags, medical masks, and vinegar-soaked keffiyehs to fight through the tear gas that would regularly suffocate many of them into unconsciousness and sometimes death. Just as often, they rushed into Mohammed Mahmoud Street near Tahrir Square with no protection at all. Casualties were retrieved by the Tahrir version of an ambulance—three-man motorcycles with a driver in front, the injured in the middle, and a human seatbelt in the back to cling to the wounded as they ripped perilously through crowds and rubble toward one of the square’s many crowded field hospitals.

I met Mourad Helmy sometime after midnight two nights later, as fighting continued. I was stumbling out of a dark alleyway near the Ministry of the Interior, making a half-run from a fresh volley of tear gas intended to drive off the teenaged revolutionaries I’d followed into the honeycomb of side streets and byways that separate the Ministry from Tahrir Square.

Helmy, forty-six, is about 6’3” and has the frame of an NFL defensive end. He was casually standing on a darkened patch of Tahrir Street listening to the incessant concussions of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets, wearing a cream-colored jacket and a Burberry scarf and smoking a cigarette in the European style, with all the fingers in his hand extended. Helmy, a successful architect and a jazz fan, represented Cairo’s cosmopolitan elite, a different social class from many of the rough-and-tumble street fighters who were staying up all night to fight the police and sustain the revolution—the Sharifs of Tahrir.

Helmy, though born in raised in Egypt, was also an Italian citizen; some of his family remained there, and his Arabic was occasionally embroidered with Italian inflections. With his aristocratic bearing and deliberate gait, he didn’t particularly fit in the square, but on Tahrir’s most violent and defiant days that week, fitting in was not a required vanity. Besides, Egypt was Helmy’s homeland and true love, and he had come down to witness what was happening in his country, a somewhat nobler motive than slumming. He offered me a cigarette, which I declined; I offered him a swig of water, my last, which he refused, though he accepted my extra gas mask.

Between 1 and 8 a.m. that morning, while the youth fought their way toward the Ministry of the Interior down Mohammed Mahmoud Street, I wandered occupied Tahrir with Helmy and witnessed an alternate, secularized vision of a democratic Egypt from the Islamocracy augured by the previous Friday. At night, the agitated daytime occupiers of Tahrir Square gave way to a wearier, more intimate bunch kept awake by nerves and by the poor street vendors supplying them tea from makeshift sidewalk cafes with plastic chairs. Others slept, bivouacked in tents or beneath mounds of blankets. Someone had a projector shooting plain white text onto the side of an apartment building overlooking the demonstration: “Tomorrow, we will take your head at the square,” the projection read, referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military government.

“This is so different,” Helmy mused as we watched small crowds of men assemble and disassemble. First, two men would begin talking; discussion would quickly metastasize into a multiparty debate, with passersby soon crowded into close orbit to listen in and inject their own opinions. Contra the walled-off compounds of Republican and Democratic orthodoxies in the United States, the square didn’t form into ideological cliques. It was like watching democracy refined into its purest, most open-ended form. “Back in January, people could barely say four words about politics,” Helmy said. “Now, it’s funny. They’re all experts. The last nine or ten months, they got an intensive course in politics.”

Street politics had actually been a growing fixture in Egypt in recent years, with demonstrations germinating nationwide before the revolution. But if those demonstrations were organized along class, neighborhood, or professional lines, Tahrir’s now lacked any internal coherence or goal other than occupation and civilian rule. The topics of discussion moved between the logistical and the symbolic. Should we take down people’s IDs so we can start some kind of plan to loan out blankets for the night? No—what if someone gives the information to the police? And what about the Muslim Brotherhood and the other political parties? They didn’t support us during the violence earlier this week, so why should we let any of them in if they come? (The Muslim Brotherhood vaguely decried the violence that week but swore off formal involvement, instead focusing on the upcoming elections it was widely expected to win.)

“We are all Egyptians” became the square’s oft-repeated mantra, ultra-inclusive to the point that it was actually exclusive: crowds steered away late-arriving politicians who tried to wedge themselves into an increasingly popular uprising. Tahrir’s spirit of inclusion, however, did not extend to foreigners and women. Reports of physical and sexual harassment escalated as xenophobia and sexism collided and took a deeper hold on Tahrir and across Egypt, fomented by the military and politicians alike.

At 3:40 a.m., Helmy and I watched an argument over whether occupation was economically sustainable: “We have to stay in the square!” “No, we have to go to work!” The demonstrations had paralyzed downtown Cairo, and the stores around Tahrir Square had no hope of opening. Another man passing by, grumbling at the strife and suspecting larger forces at play, remarked, “The Americans are playing us like a marionette,” echoing the discomfort Egyptians feel with the largely unwanted involvement of the United States in their country. The arguments were paused by a surprise barrage of fireworks at 4 a.m., and the mood eased. Helmy smiled. “I consider Tahrir to be the high point,” he said. “Here, people say whatever they want.”

Sometime shortly before dawn, an effete young man walked up to me and, seeing my notebook, thrust out his hand and initiated an interview of himself in simple but workable English. His name was Youssif Ghatwary, a twenty-three-year-old political science student more representative of the square’s civic occupiers than its warrior caste. After the violence began, he descended on Tahrir not to fight, but to distribute Pepsi, a popular remedy for tear-gas-inflamed eyes. He was upset that Occupy Wall Street, a point of curiosity among many Egyptians, had been so brutally broken up by American police, and doubly upset that an Egyptian official had appeared on state television during the Tahrir insurrection to use the American crackdown as justification for the immensely more violent Egyptian edition. Helmy, mixing nearby with the potpourri of social classes and political viewpoints that we encountered on Tahrir, needled Ghatwary into admitting that he hadn’t come down to the previous Friday’s supposedly multiparty protest because of the heavy Islamist presence. The two commiserated, but praised the square’s return toward a revolutionary vibe more simpatico with their sensibilities.

“I was very happy, because I wanted to say, ‘Egyptian is Egyptian,’” said Ghatwary of the resurgent protests, fumbling a little to summon words to describe the social inclusiveness he’d hoped for.

“The simple person can protest here,” Helmy suggested.

“Exactly,” Ghatwary said. This was the prevailing Tahririan spirit.

THE WEEK’S demonstrations on Tahrir culminated on Friday, as they always did, with a crowd that resembled the country’s winter insurrectionaries. Middle-class families joined the action and jammed up all the roads and sidewalks around the square. There were fewer flags and more tents than in January. “People are not so proud of their country this time around,” mused Helmy, who again accompanied me to the square.

Helmy was a night owl and would call me at late hours to ask whether I’d like to head down to Tahrir. When a brief ceasefire on Thursday between the youth and the security forces had ended violently and Helmy and I watched a young man pronounced dead of tear gas asphyxiation in a darkened alley next to a pile of trash and a street fire—“It’s too much, no?” he’d murmur during intense moments, like an incantation—we retreated to a nearby cafe with internet access so I could file a report for the Los Angeles Times. Helmy watched the news on a nearby TV and seemed anxious to leave the cafe when it seemed like the army was retaking the square. I mistakenly thought it was because he was worried we weren’t safe where we were. “I have to get back,” he told me. “I have to understand what is happening in my country.”

Reliable numbers, as always, are hard to come by, though some estimate that Tahrir Square and its nearby side streets can hold somewhere between 200,000 to 400,000 people—a modest number when you consider Tahrir’s symbolic significance to a nation bursting with 80 million residents. By Friday night, after a long week of lonely and desperate resistance by a few thousand people, the country now stood at attention; the square was packed to capacity; Tantawi was expected to make a speech, and many suspected he would step down and complete the revolution Egypt began in January, reinvigorating the democratizing powers that seemed to have been sapped out of Tahrir Square. “It takes you all this time to control Wall Street,” boasted Adnan Hammed, a twenty-nine-year-old Egyptian with a leather Looney Tunes jacket, when he learned I was from America. We were on an elevated sidewalk overlooking a sprawling mass of Egyptians. “Two days, and we control all the streets.”

Yet it wasn’t to be. Tantawi declined to step down, offering a few pro forma shuffles destined to disappoint the crowd, which they did. The military continued to bank on the support of the “Couch Party,” the silent majority that military leaders believed privately supported the army. The mood on the square, expectedly, was frustrated, much as it had been eight months ago when Mubarak initially refused to step down. Yet Tantawi did offer a key concession. Presidential elections would now be held far earlier, by June. This was a validation. Tahrir still had some magic. Protests on the square had worked.

Then something bizarre happened: three days later, Egypt held a fair and uneventful election.

EGYPT’S FIRST parliamentary poll, which began on November 28, was marred only by G-rated mayhem, compared to the legendarily bogus vote of 2010, regarded as one of the country’s most fraudulent elections ever. This time, voters flocked to the polls and did what voters normally do: they waited in line and cast their votes for the politicians they thought suited them. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. “The whole world is watching us, so they cannot cheat anymore,” pronounced one first-time voter waiting in line in a quiet downtown alley outside Talaat Harb High School, two feet from a man handing out candidate fliers illegally. The canvasser responsible for the rather innocuous violation, an unemployed electrician, wouldn’t give his name, but said he was paid to hand out fliers for Gameela Ismail, a parliamentary candidate and one of Egypt’s most famous female politicians. Unemployment here was high, after all. When asked if he supported her, he shrugged and said, “Sure, sure, sure.”

A couple hours later in Cairo’s cosmopolitan Garden City district, on the opposite side of Tahrir Square, Ismail emerged from the polling station at El Ibrahimia High School to declare the early hours of the election a success. “This morning is a completely different morning,” Ismail told me. (I ran into her by chance and didn’t think to ask her about the man handing out her fliers.) “This is an election with the flavor of the revolution, with the people organizing [the process] themselves. Before, you would expect fraud, bribery, thuggery—and all of these things might happen in the next few hours—but so far, it’s great.” And if the process wasn’t a success? “We still have the square to go back to,” Ismail said.

But the square now looked increasingly irrelevant. During the early hours of the November 28 election, Tahrir had the deflated, beaten-down energy of the last day of a state fair. Egyptians were exercising their democratic energies elsewhere. Tents sagged after a rare rainstorm pummeled them the previous night. Cordoned-off Mohammed Mahmoud Street, once a battleground, seemed to attract more sightseers than would-be revolutionaries. It had been renamed “The Eyes of Freedom Street” by the protesters to honor their blinded comrades, while the world’s gaze moved on. The wall the army installed to block the protesters’ path to the Ministry of the Interior was now just another surface to graffiti. A boy squirted beneath the rope line before a volunteer shooed him off: “Come on, go outside.” A man chanting verses from the Koran nearly attracted a crowd larger than a gaggle of nearby protesters chanting anti-military slogans.

This was, for now, Tahrir’s final portrait—the ragged home of the revolution’s forgotten, the youth who were akin to guardians for the activists who had held the square.

The pacifist utopia of democratic debate I explored with Helmy the previous week could not have survived without its less sophisticated, less comfortable-to-explain military arm: the hundreds of often lower-class Cairo men and boys who poured into Mohammed Mahmoud Street to grind through more than 100 straight hours of fevered and bloody street fighting with the government’s security forces. They were seemingly detached from both the elections and the politics of the square to their rear, but nonetheless sacrificed themselves to keep it safe, or to attack the Ministry of the Interior. Dozens died and thousands were injured as they brawled and taunted the state security forces. At home, many of them were unemployed or underpaid. (By custom they are not allowed to have girlfriends as casually as Westerners do; many of them will not be able to save up enough money for a wedding and a home for years.) The youth are Egypt’s invisible class, unlikely to be represented in parliament, and as soon as the fighting was over, they slipped back off the main stage. By the November 28 election, they had all but faded into the margins.

“Why are you still silent when your brothers got killed?” chanted Mahmoud Magdelashry, twenty, to a small group of youths halfheartedly repeating him as the sun beat down over the square. The masses that had surrounded them just a few days ago had vanished. Many of them looked too young to vote, like many of the fighters I saw on Mohammed Mahmoud Street and curled up on soiled rugs in the field hospitals where some of them died. “Where are the snipers?” Magdelashry continued to chant. “We are here, we need your bullets.”

His voice was hoarse, and his chorus was drowned out by a classic protest song by Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam droning out of a nearby tuk-tuk (a covered, motorized rickshaw). The tuk-tuk had a banner draped over it that read, “Our youth died to support freedom, and our political parties just care about elections and their personal interests”—a jab at the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed state violence on Tahrir Square but never backed the protests.

“I’m not leaving, and I’m not going to vote,” said the tuk-tuk’s driver, twenty-seven, who would only give his name as “Egyptian.” When pressed, he offered the name of his son, Yassin Omar. “Seventy percent of the candidates are former NDP [remnants of Mubarak’s regime], and 20 percent are from political parties that sold out our revolution,” he said. “The last 10 percent are just individuals with no platform, and we don’t know anything about them.”

His figures were off; the old party members would play a much smaller role than in previous elections, particularly without cadres of paid thugs at poll stations to scare off voters and stuff ballot boxes. But if the military continued to hold extra-constitutional powers, even a clean election could be meaningless—the democratic vote an obstacle rather than a central feature of the country’s new mechanism of governance. When clashes in Tahrir resumed again in December, it became clear that the January revolution hadn’t done the trick, nor the November uprisings. It seemed that Tahrir was not actually the beating, democratic heart at the center of the country, but a kind of recurring dream whose symbols and figures were losing their mystique for Egyptians over time. When Egyptian soldiers stripped and savagely beat a veiled woman in a blue bra in mid-December, thousands of women turned out on the square and made themselves a formidable presence for the first time since the start of the revolution. But even their fresh presence on the square promised little. The regime was proving too strong, other Egyptians too complacent. Tahrir was now defined as much by who wasn’t here, a huge negative space flecked only by the diehards who refused to be blotted out.

After Magdelashry climbed down from his perch shouting over the youth, he told me he had been in the square since January 25, only going home to shower, and that he planned on staying through elections he thought would not be meaningful. “If you make fair elections, of course we’re going home,” Magdelashry told me. “We don’t want to stay here.”

Hours later, as voting in Cairo continued smoothly and the Islamists began to bring in the votes that are the first sentences of Egypt’s next chapter, the last remaining Tahririans milled around and continued their chants unabated: the revolution belongs to the youth, not the political parties. Magdelashry was still there, chanting hoarsely for the end of the regime.

Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times, the New Inquiry, and the Pitch in Kansas City. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce.

All photos courtesy of the author